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The Washington Post pulled out all the stops — on a weekday, no less — to offer the inside story of how the splintered Democrats failed to keep the dreaded Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. from reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
Every year since 1953, an extremely mysterious Christian group called The Fellowship has hosted a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. At $400+ a pop, tickets for the breakfast are some of the hottest in town (don’t worry, it’s free on C-SPAN for us plebeians). Leaders of Christian groups across the country make sure to attend, as do dignitaries from around the world. Every president has attended for the last 50 years. Tables are full of senators and Congress members.
I was busy writing a column last night and didn’t watch the State of the Union. However, I think it’s safe to predict that, once again, there will be lively debate among some conservatives about President Bush’s restatement of his claims that American can, almost literally, create peace on earth.
Yes, Kanye West posed as Jesus Christ on the cover of Rolling Stone. And, like he’s a Pat Robertson-in-training, the grandstanding worked. Media outlets splashed the news everywhere. So it was nice to see the way Rashod Ollison analyzed young Kanye for the Baltimore Sun:
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito will most likely be confirmed this week or the next by the Senate and for the first time in United States history, the nation’s highest court will have a majority of Catholics serving on the bench. The Economist, with its European perspective, unsurprisingly sees this event as more significant than do its American counterparts:
This New York Times story does everything possible to fit the facts into the mold of a “Democrats try to get religion in order to appeal to religious people” story. I find this an an example of how many in the Democratic Party and many mainstream reporters do not get religion or religious people.
The second item in the ombudsman column Monday by the Public Broadcasting System’s Michael Getler deals with complaints from viewers who believe the publicly funded PBS carries too many Christian-oriented programs.
For those of you who are still maintaining the Pat Robertson watch, here is the latest from the omnipresent Julia Duin of the Washington Times (who, it seems, has been able to cover a dozen stories in the past week or so). It seems that the leaders of the National Religious Broadcasters have had second thoughts about Robertson’s upcoming address:
Canada made some news earlier this week by electing a conservative government for the first time in about a dozen years. The conventional wisdom says that it all came down to a well-run campaign and a corrupted liberal party government as the new prime minister Stephen Harper moved to the center by avoiding issues like abortion and gay marriage.
